How, exactly, do we move from full time work to the relaxation, pleasures, and fulfillments of retirement? That is the question being asked by many of my peers. The answers vary greatly, and they’re often far more complex that we have been led to suspect.
Psychological researchers say that retirement takes place in stages. Here’s a typical map of the journey:
- Stage 1: Pre-retirement. Pre-retirement is the stage before you retire, this usually is around 5 to 10 years.
- Stage 2: The honeymoon phase.
- Stage 3: Disenchantment.
- Stage 4: Re-orientation and finding yourself.
- Stage 5: Stability.
As is true of most stage theories, this one is seductive. It presents a journey that we can understand; and, despite the difficulties along the way, the river seems navigable. Especially because it ends well. It also serves as a kind of cultural prescription. By setting expectations, the psychologists that we encounter in AARP, Psychology Today, and so many other venues, virtually suggest that we should go through these stages. Thus, description morphs into prescription.
I don’t buy it, or at least, I don’t think that an orderly march from one stage to another matches my own experience or that of my friends. Some seem to have altogether skipped a period of disenchantment and have needed very little reorientation. Instead, they claim to have leapt in one great bound from work—and what had even seemed like life-defining work—into the “best time of my life.” The key, they tell me, has been relief from responsibility, anxiety, and frequent failures—or perceived failures; and, in the absence of these fraught experiences, a stroll right into a time of pleasure, peace, and many small fulfillments.
In this case the “small” part of fulfillment is key. They’re not expecting nirvana or even perfect days. Just enough each day and most days to enjoy old age and to ward off the encroachments of old age.
For me, retirement came relatively quickly. I reached a point where I loved the idea of my work, its potential, and some of the parts, but not the full responsibility. In fact, the casting off of responsibility has been one of the main themes of my retirement. And letting go has come in many forms and stages. I found a successor for the organization I had founded. She has been so good at the job that, for six years now, I have felt relaxed, sometimes joyous at passing on the reigns.
After years of caretaking, I have begun to let old roles with children and grandchildren go—not completely, of course. I have loved how we related to one another. But letting them go as such a defining part of my life. After 6 years of writing a blog—and many years of writing books and articles—I feel that writing is fading into the rear-view mirror. I don’t feel like working around our house, and sometimes, still only rarely, even wish for the comforts of an independent-living facility.
Something cries out in me: I want to rest and to be free. Even to be taken care of. But these desires still feel fleeting because I love to exercise, love my family and my home, and still cherish the feeling of being needed, of being on the helping side of the journey. In fact, I keep inventing plans to create new organizations, probably so I can still be in or near the center of something.
Walt Whitman once wrote: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes. Most of the time, I’m happy to live in contradictions and ambiguities.
Since I never felt tremendously oppressed or bored by work, I never went through the honeymoon phase. Nor have I been overly impressed by either the freedom or the new activities or the rest that are now available to me. So, count me as an exception, and, among my friends, there are lots of other exceptions.
What seems particularly absent in the stage theory is the nuance and distinctiveness of our lives. For instance, the experience of retirement is immensely influenced by our marriages: how loving or conflicted; how engaging or boring; how expansive or limiting. And, with an especially large dose of marriage during the pandemic, its influence seems to have been magnified.
The quality of retirement depends, too, on our agendas. Many of us, for instance, have limited or held off on our artistic and musical lives and, finally, find the time to pursue them. Time to hike and travel and garden, time to see the world, too.
If you have grandchildren nearby, retirement finally permits you to play out all those loving and nurturing feelings that had been limited by professional life.
On the other side of the ledger, work has held many of us like a good and bad mother, its business and concerns crowding out our darker feelings. For some, retirement releases that darkness. Anxiety and depression find fertile ground in freedom. When this happens, the journey through the stages halts abruptly, painfully, and sometimes enduringly, in disenchantment.
So, if retirement isn’t so easy to chart or if it doesn’t fit so neatly into what our culture and its psychological experts expects of us—what’s embodied in the stages—what is a useful way to envision retirement.
I hardly have all the answers but I do have a few suggestions. First, be alert to what you are actually feeling, to what opportunities do present themselves, to what limitations limit. And don’t stuff your thoughts and feelings into cultural expectations. Be yourselves in old age—almost as though you were reaching a second adolescence.
Second, allow for and celebrate complexity. Your family and friends will bend your experience in a variety of ways. The way that you felt about work—its successes and failures, its pleasures and drudgeries—will shape your experience of old age. There’s no way to run away from them.
Opportunities—to volunteer, play music, care for grandchildren—and lack of opportunities will shape your experience. As will the mood you bring to life. In other words, be alert to what is, not what might or ought to be.
This transition from work to retirement is an extraordinarily complex stage of life—and, in its duration, it is relatively uncharted by prior generations. Who knows what to expect. Why can’t we imagine ourselves as fortunate for our ignorance, for the surprises we encounter. We don’t have to fit into pop psych views of waltzing in a lovely sunset or primarily coping with our diminishment. We don’t know what our future will bring. That can be a good thing.
Third, cultivate an open mind. This is the least charted stage of life and there is so much to learn, so much to experience. Open your senses and your mind, not to what you think is in front of you but what actually is there.
Barry Dym 